Read This: Usagi Yojimbo

One of my favorite presents from last year’s holiday season was Fantagraphics’ Usagi Yojimbo: The Special Edition, a two-volume slipcased collection of the earliest issues of Stan Sakai’s groundbreaking independent comic book about the adventures of a masterless samurai in a fantasy Japan populated by anthropomorphic creatures. (Usagi is Japanese for rabbit, and Kurosawa fans will recognize the action-packed significance of Yojimbo.) From the beginning, Sakai’s script and artwork were able to combine a grand sweep with intimate characterization; the panel above, from Usagi’s first appearance in 1984, hints at a backstory that would take years to unfold.

Along the way, Sakai would insert sly tributes to samurai movie icons like Gennosuke (a rhino with a distinct resemblance to Toshiro Mifune) and Zato-Ino the blind swordspig—they might seem like one-off jokes at first, but then he folds them perfectly into The Dragon Bellow Conspiracy, a story that rivals just about any epic fantasy (novel or film) in the last 25 years for its narrative complexity and powerful action sequences. But it’s not just the hundreds of pages of graphic novel storytelling at its finest that makes this a must-read. You also get a glimpse at Sakai’s earliest sketches for the character, a reprint of Usagi’s first crossover with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, an extensive interview with Sakai, and a pictorial guide to how he creates the comics. (I’m actually still working my way through the main storyline, but I skipped ahead to read all this backmatter, and it’s really fun!) Reading this stories will help you understand why, when we talk about the success stories of independent comics publishing, Usagi Yojimbo should be one of the first titles that gets mentioned. (And there’s plenty more Usagi graphic novels to read after this!)

14 March 2011 | read this |

Get Ready to Read This: A Moment in the Sun

Nearly two years ago, I did an interview with the Los Angeles Times about an unsold John Sayles novel about late 19th-century America, which was then called Some Time in the Sun—Given that Sayles was already a well-respected fiction writer, in addition to his film career, the question they had for me was: Why weren’t New York’s top publishers interested? Although I only had one direct quote in the final story (“You’d think there would be some editor who’d be proud to say, ‘I brought the new John Sayles novel to this house'”), some of the things I said to the reporter came though in other subtle ways, like the notion that “the real challenge in selling a quality title now is not getting an editor to say yes, but overcoming the many ways a skeptical house can say no.” And the fact that Sayles’ manuscript was about 1,000 pages long seemed like an easy reason for editors at the most commercial houses to stop the conversation, no matter how much they might like the story on its literary merits.

At the time, I suggested to the reporter that Sayles should forget the plan he and his agent, Anthony Amove, were trying to execute—”land a deal with a deep-pockets publisher who can promote the sprawling, epic tale about racism and the dawn of U.S. imperialism,” as the Times put it—and start talking to smaller, independent literary houses that would be willing to pour the majority of their passion and their energy into publishing such a novel. So here we are in 2011, and A Moment in the Sun (maybe not a great title, but a better title, at any rate) will be arriving in May from McSweeney’s Books. “We were swimming against the stream trying to place a novel of this scope,” Amove told the Wall Street Journal recently. And though this means Sayles collected a smaller advance, and will fewer marketing dollars allocated, than if the novel had been placed at one of the bigger publishers, McSweeney’s still has significant plans for the book, including a 24-city book tour.

I have a two-volume galley of A Moment in the Sun, which I’m looking forward to reading this spring. After all, the last 1,000-page novel I read from McSweeney’s was Adam Levin’s The Instructions, and I hope we all remember how much I loved that book…

1 March 2011 | read this |